She and any sort of passion had always seemed so far apart.
Now after all Alan was very much a man, if a modest one, with all a
man's instincts, and therefore there are appearances of the female face
which even such as he could not entirely misinterpret.
"You--don't--mean," he said doubtfully, "you don't really mean----" and
he stood hesitating before her.
"If you would put your question a little more clearly, Alan, I might be
able to give you an answer," she replied, that quaint little smile of
hers creeping to the corners of her mouth like sunshine through a mist
of rain.
"You don't really mean," he went on, "that you care anything about me,
like, like I have cared for you for years?"
"Oh! Alan," she said, laughing outright, "why in the name of goodness
shouldn't I care about you? I didn't say that I do, mind, but why
shouldn't I? What is the gulf between us?"
"The old one," he answered, "that between Dives and Lazarus--that
between the rich and the poor."
"Alan," said Barbara, looking down, "I don't know what has come over me,
but for some unexplained and inexplicable reason I am inclined to
give Lazarus a lead--across that gulf, the first one, I mean, not the
second!"
Like the glance which preceded it, this was a saying that even Alan
could not misunderstand.
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